In 1972, a Soviet Jewish systems engineer named Yitzchak Kogan found out that the technology he was working on was being shipped to Egypt and Syria. Unable to stomach the idea of aiding the Jewish state’s enemies, he applied for permission to leave for Israel. Although fourteen years elapsed before he and his wife obtained exit visas, they were immediately fired from the jobs. The two returned to Russia in 1991, just five years after gaining their freedom, and Kogan became the rabbi of a Moscow synagogue, and remains active in Jewish communal and religious life.

From his childhood on, Kogan—known among Chabad Ḥasidim as the tsaddik (righteous man) of Leningrad—obtained a Jewish education and observed Jewish practices in defiance of the regime, and sometimes at great personal risk. Dovid Margolin writes:

As soon as Kogan began attending Soviet public school, his parents hired the first of a string of m’lamdim, Jewish religious teachers, to come to their home. . . . It was not only what the old men taught Kogan that he absorbed, but what they left unsaid. Each of them, without exception, had suffered for his beliefs at the hands of the Communist regime. [One] teacher, Rabbi Berel Medalia, was the son of Rabbi Shmarya Leib Medalia, a Lubavitcher Ḥasid who served as chief rabbi of Moscow before being arrested and executed by Stalin in 1938; three of Rabbi Shmarya Leib’s sons were likewise arrested. Berel Medalia served something like a decade in the Gulag system. . . . Despite everything, in addition to teaching children like the Kogans, over the years Medalia became a quiet Jewish influence on many young refuseniks.

As Kogan’s bar mitzvah approached in the summer of 1959, his mother feared the ceremony would summon unwanted interest from the authorities, and turned to the recently released [from imprisonment] Rabbi Moshe Mordechai Epstein for advice. Epstein instructed her to hold the bar mitzvah in a small summer vacation town outside Leningrad. “He also said that Papa shouldn’t be there,” Kogan explains. “Instead of my father, Rabbi Epstein made the Barukh she-p’tarani [the blessing a father recites at his sons’ bar mitzvah].”

Kogan would later train to be a ritual slaughterer, in order to provide Leningrad’s Jews with kosher meat, and served as a sort of unofficial rabbi for his fellow refuseniks:

Among the many young Jewish refuseniks who credit the Kogans’ assistance on their path to Judaism were Lev and Marina Furman, who first connected with them in 1974. They would recall joining about 50 others at the Kogans’ apartment for their first kosher Passover seder. Other communal activities at the Kogan home included Hebrew and Jewish study circles and Purim shpils.

For some time, opponents of U.S support for Israel have been urging the White House to end the war in Gaza, or simply calling for a ceasefire. Douglas Feith and Lewis Libby consider what such a result would actually entail:

Ending the war immediately would allow Hamas to survive and retain military and governing power. Leaving it in the area containing the Sinai-Gaza smuggling routes would ensure that Hamas can rearm. This is why Hamas leaders now plead for a ceasefire. A ceasefire will provide some relief for Gazans today, but a prolonged ceasefire will preserve Hamas’s bloody oppression of Gaza and make future wars with Israel inevitable.

For most Gazans, even when there is no hot war, Hamas’s dictatorship is a nightmarish tyranny. Hamas rule features the torture and murder of regime opponents, official corruption, extremist indoctrination of children, and misery for the population in general. Hamas diverts foreign aid and other resources from proper uses; instead of improving life for the mass of the people, it uses the funds to fight against Palestinians and Israelis.

Moreover, a Hamas-affiliated website warned Gazans last month against cooperating with Israel in securing and delivering the truckloads of aid flowing into the Strip. It promised to deal with those who do with “an iron fist.” In other words, if Hamas remains in power, it will begin torturing, imprisoning, or murdering those it deems collaborators the moment the war ends. Thereafter, Hamas will begin planning its next attack on Israel:

Hamas’s goals are to overshadow the Palestinian Authority, win control of the West Bank, and establish Hamas leadership over the Palestinian revolution. Hamas’s ultimate aim is to spark a regional war to obliterate Israel and, as Hamas leaders steadfastly maintain, fulfill a Quranic vision of killing all Jews.

Hamas planned for corpses of Palestinian babies and mothers to serve as the mainspring of its October 7 war plan. Hamas calculated it could survive a war against a superior Israeli force and energize enemies of Israel around the world. The key to both aims was arranging for grievous Palestinian civilian losses. . . . That element of Hamas’s war plan is working impressively.